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My loyal six readers will know that I've been exploring Slashdot as an avenue for attracting page hits to this site. In the name of science, I decided to try submitting story ideas to the venerable geek news site to see what affect having my URL on a front page story would have.
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Not only is it higher, it lasts longer. The total increase in hits from a front-page story submission appears to be about three. A good +5 insightful post can attract between 20 and 50 hits over a day or two. You know, from my one data point.
Hey, I never said I was an actual scientist. I'm a web designer. What do I know about statistical analysis?
Now I need to explore other avenues for my guerilla marketing tactics. I hate Digg (though I keep their button on my blog because I think it's funny) and LinkedIn seems too co-dependent for me to spend much time exploiting it. Maybe ExpertsExchange would do it, but then I'd actually have to post relevant and helpful answers before the rest of the relevant and helpful crowd posts them.
I still think Slashdot has the most bang for my buck on an ongoing basis, especially since my coolhomepages.com traffic has slowed considerably now that my site is no longer on the front page. It had a really good run there, pulling in over 3000 hits so far. I've got submissions in for a few other web awards, and I'll let you know how those go if they actually win. The problem with more traditional awards institutions is that they can take months to finally decide who they like, and the competition is a lot fiercer.
So far the best online marketing has been blog mentions. In those cases it doesn't matter how many hits they drive but the fact that those hits are much more likely to result in a project, which is ultimately the whole point of marketing. I'd still be paying Google for AdWords if even a single project had come through one of their links.
Weird. I usually have only nice things to say about Google. I'll get a good night's sleep and I'm sure I'll go back to being a fanboi.
